Online Community Basics: Start with Research - The 3 questions to ask - Online Community Report
I hadn’t heard of this blog/site until a colleague pinged me about it. It has some excellent advice on issues to consider when thinking about designing for an online community, especially the idea of an “ecosystem” that’s already there to […]

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Yeah, I modified the title a bit… but that’s the gist of what I’ve scanned so far. Basically, all this worry over teens naively posting all their personal information for predators to poach may be somewhat overblown. The kids are alright, and savvier than we think.
Pew Internet: Teens, Privacy and SNS
Some 55% of online […]

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Michael Hirschorn has some thoughtful and sobering comments on the “social computing” hype in the Atlantic Online: The Web 2.0 Bubble
The walled-garden attributes of MySpace and Facebook, like those of the subscriber-era AOL, can quickly become liabilities. And as the value of social-media tools becomes inevitably unsexy and commoditized, it may be only a matter […]

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I love this quote. When asked if Web 1.0 was about connecting computers, while Web 2.0 is about connecting people, Webfather Tim Berners-Lee said,
“Totally not. Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. […]

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Colleague Michael Magoolaghan passed along a link to the transcript of Tim Berners-Lee’s testimony before Congress.
Hearing on the “Digital Future of the United States: Part I — The Future of the World Wide Web”
It’s fascinating reading, and extremely quotable. But one part that really struck me is in the first paragraphs (emphasis added):
To […]

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Just a few days ago, I posted about how somebody needs to make something that aggregates an individual’s myriad social networks. And it looks like, around that time, something launched that is aiming to do just that … it’s called Explode.
From their site: How do I Explode?
Explode lets you have a widget which contains […]

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I wasn’t aware there was such debate over what makes a blog a blog, and a wiki a wiki. But Jordan Frank over at Traction Software makes a sensible distinction, one that I could’ve sworn everybody took for granted?
What is a Blog? A Wiki?
And that, finally, brings me to a baseline definition for both blogs […]

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When I posted my missive about mashups last week, I should’ve known others were saying much of the same stuff at least a week earlier.
Adam Greenfield has a great post explaining how you have to design with the assumption that your creation will be remixed and retrofitted into a larger context:
Two things product designers […]

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I’ve been kvetching for a year or more now about how crazy it is trying to keep up with various social networks online.
The truth is, many of us have stuff we do at MySpace or Yahoo, some we might do on our own blog (either self-hosted or at TypePad or Blogspot, etc), and maybe […]

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This video is amazing. I’m not sure how to describe it. Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing said this about it:
“Web 2.0… the Machine is Us/ing Us,” is deeply moving and incredibly smart. The creator is Michael Wesch, an assistant Cultural Anthropology Prof at Kansas State U, and he has strung together a bunch of animations, […]

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I’ve been thinking a lot about mashups recently. I’ve been asking myself the question: as a user-experience designer, what happens when the experience I’ve designed gets usurped, or disintermediated, by people taking what they want of it and leaving the rest behind? What does that mean to me as a designer: i.e. what is it, […]

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Austin Govella makes the point razor-sharp in his post on Agile Development and Design:
Agile development won’t give you better design. Design models things to be made. Development makes things you’ve modeled. Agile development methods promise better model-making, but don’t promise better models. Agile development can actually devastate design.
Thanks man. I’m going to quote you in, […]

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